Areas of Cardiac Care

Emergency Cardiac Care

Since 2001, Valley Medical Center has been a champion of improving cardiac response times in hospitals across the nation. With one of the busiest emergency departments on the West coast, VMC’s exceptional record of patient outcomes has drawn national attention and accolades.

Valley Medical Center's door-to-balloon time – from the moment a patient arrives to the time we remove a blockage – consistently beats the 90-minute-or-less national benchmark by half an hour. A record so impressive that Yale University researchers visited Valley Medical Center to study our door-to-balloon procedures.

How do we do it? Streamlined emergency cardiac procedures mean we are poised to act the moment a patient arrives, resulting in outcomes that far exceed national norms. These measures include:

Direct line to medics

Dedicated cardiac team

24/7 on-call cardiologists

Therapeutic hypothermia

Emergency and diagnostic cardiac catheterization

Emergency angioplasty and stenting

24-hour acute chest pain evaluation

Interventional Cardiology

Advancements in cardiac care—from diagnostics to pharmaceuticals to technology—have made interventional cardiology (minimally-invasive) procedures more common than open-heart or bypass surgery for blockages and narrowing of the artery.

Valley Medical Center has cardiologists who specialize in minimally-invasive percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) on call 24/7. PCI is now considered the gold standard of care for an acute myocardial infarction (heart attack), and can include the following procedures:

Angioplasty

Stents

Thrombus aspiration

Furthermore, Valley Medical Center's door-to-balloon time – from the moment a patient arrives to the time we remove a blockage – is a half an hour faster than the 90-minute-or-less national benchmark. This means our patients have a better chance of surviving a heart attack.

Preventive Cardiac Care

Modern medicine and diagnostics give us the ability to prevent the majority of heart attacks. VMC's cardiac care includes the following diagnostic and preventive services: